Nobody actually decides to hire locally. It just happens. The job posting goes on a nearby board, a referral comes in from a friend of a friend, and three years later your entire team lives within a twenty-minute radius of an office nobody visits anymore.
I recently spoke with Western Business about the default nobody questions, and the signs that tell you it’s already costing you.
Here’s the moment that changed how I hire. Early on, every role I opened got filled by whoever was closest, not whoever was best. I wasn’t choosing local talent. I was choosing convenience and calling it a hiring strategy. The gap between those two things is bigger than most founders admit.
The principle underneath all five signs is simple. Geography should never be the first filter. Skill, fit, and output should decide who gets the role. Where they happen to live comes after, not before. Once you flip that order, your candidate pool stops being a neighborhood and starts being the world.
Running three companies with teams spread across continents forced me to build the systems that make this actually work: shared documentation, async-first communication, and clear ownership instead of clock-watching. I’ve written before about how the distributed model became the standard rather than the exception for lean operators, and it’s the same logic underneath this piece.
The part that surprised me most, revisiting this with Western Business, is that the real cost of hiring local was never the salary premium. It was the ceiling. Every role filled by “whoever’s around” quietly narrows what your company is capable of building, long before you notice the pattern.
None of this means global hiring is automatically right for every role. Some positions genuinely need someone in the room. But if you haven’t asked the question in years, that’s enough to show you’re operating on autopilot, not on strategy.
Read the full article on Western Business →
The best hires you’ll ever make are probably not in your city, and you won’t know until you stop assuming they have to be.
